Books: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

J >> John Fox, Jr. >> The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

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"The law has come here and it has come to stay." He faced the
beetling eyebrows and angrily working beard of old Judd now:

"The Falins are here to get revenge on you Tollivers, if you
attack us. I know that. But"--he wheeled on the Falins--
"understand! We don't want your help! If the Tollivers try to take
that man in there, and one of you Falins draws a pistol, those
guns there"--waving his hand toward the jail windows--"will be
turned loose on YOU, WE'LL FIGHT YOU BOTH!" The last words shot
like bullets through his gritted teeth, then the flash of his eyes
was gone, his face was calm, and as though the whole matter had
been settled beyond possible interruption, he finished quietly:

"The condemned man wishes to make a confession and to say good-by.
In five minutes he will be at that window to say what he pleases.
Ten minutes later he will be hanged." And he turned and walked
calmly into the jailer's door. Not a Tolliver nor a Falin made a
movement or a sound. Young Dave's eyes had glared savagely when he
first saw Hale, for he had marked Hale for his own and he knew
that the fact was known to Hale. Had the battle begun then and
there, Hale's death was sure, and Dave knew that Hale must know
that as well as he: and yet with magnificent audacity, there he
was--unarmed, personally helpless, and invested with an insulting
certainty that not a shot would be fired. Not a Falin or a
Tolliver even reached for a weapon, and the fact was the subtle
tribute that ignorance pays intelligence when the latter is forced
to deadly weapons as a last resort; for ignorance faced now
belching shot-guns and was commanded by rifles on every side. Old
Judd was trapped and the Falins were stunned. Old Buck Falin
turned his eyes down the line of his men with one warning glance.
Old Judd whispered something to a Tolliver behind him and a moment
later the man slipped from the band and disappeared. Young Dave
followed Hale's figure with a look of baffled malignant hatred and
Bub's eyes were filled with angry tears. Between the factions, the
grim young men stood with their guns like statues.

At once a big man with a red face appeared at one of the jailer's
windows and then came the sheriff, who began to take out the sash.
Already the frightened crowd had gathered closer again and now a
hush came over it, followed by a rustling and a murmur. Something
was going to happen. Faces and gun-muzzles thickened at the port-
holes and at the windows; the line of guards turned their faces
sidewise and upward; the crowd on the fence scuffled for better
positions; the people in the trees craned their necks from the
branches or climbed higher, and there was a great scraping on all
the roofs. Even the black crowd out on the hills seemed to catch
the excitement and to sway, while spots of intense blue and vivid
crimson came out here and there from the blackness when the women
rose from their seats on the ground. Then--sharply--there was
silence. The sheriff disappeared, and shut in by the sashless
window as by a picture frame and blinking in the strong light,
stood a man with black hair, cropped close, face pale and worn,
and hands that looked white and thin--stood bad Rufe Tolliver.

He was going to confess--that was the rumour. His lawyers wanted
him to confess; the preacher who had been singing hymns with him
all morning wanted him to confess; the man himself said he wanted
to confess; and now he was going to confess. What deadly mysteries
he might clear up if he would! No wonder the crowd was eager, for
there was no soul there but knew his record--and what a record!
His best friends put his victims no lower than thirteen, and there
looking up at him were three women whom he had widowed or
orphaned, while at one corner of the jail-yard stood a girl in
black--the sweetheart of Mockaby, for whose death Rufe was
standing where he stood now. But his lips did not open. Instead he
took hold of the side of the window and looked behind him. The
sheriff brought him a chair and he sat down. Apparently he was
weak and he was going to wait a while. Would he tell how he had
killed one Falin in the presence of the latter's wife at a wild
bee tree; how he had killed a sheriff by dropping to the ground
when the sheriff fired, in this way dodging the bullet and then
shooting the officer from where he lay supposedly dead; how he had
thrown another Falin out of the Court House window and broken his
neck--the Falin was drunk, Rufe always said, and fell out; why,
when he was constable, he had killed another--because, Rufe said,
he resisted arrest; how and where he had killed Red-necked
Johnson, who was found out in the woods? Would he tell all that
and more? If he meant to tell there was no sign. His lips kept
closed and his bright black eyes were studying the situation; the
little squad of youngsters, back to back, with their repeating
shot-guns, the line of Falins along the wall toward whom protruded
six shining barrels, the huddled crowd of Tollivers toward whom
protruded six more--old Judd towering in front with young Dave on
one side, tense as a leopard about to spring, and on the other
Bub, with tears streaming down his face. In a flash he understood,
and in that flash his face looked as though he had been suddenly
struck a heavy blow by some one from behind, and then his elbows
dropped on the sill of the window, his chin dropped into his hands
and a murmur arose. Maybe he was too weak to stand and talk--
perhaps he was going to talk from his chair. Yes, he was leaning
forward and his lips were opening, but no sound came. Slowly his
eyes wandered around at the waiting people--in the trees, on the
roofs and the fence--and then they dropped to old Judd's and
blazed their appeal for a sign. With one heave of his mighty chest
old Judd took off his slouch hat, pressed one big hand to the back
of his head and, despite that blazing appeal, kept it there. At
that movement Rufe threw his head up as though his breath had
suddenly failed him, his face turned sickening white, and slowly
again his chin dropped into his trembling hands, and still
unbelieving he stared his appeal, but old Judd dropped his big
hand and turned his head away. The condemned man's mouth twitched
once, settled into defiant calm, and then he did one kindly thing.
He turned in his seat and motioned Bob Berkley, who was just
behind him, away from the window, and the boy, to humour him,
stepped aside. Then he rose to his feet and stretched his arms
wide. Simultaneously came the far-away crack of a rifle, and as a
jet of smoke spurted above a clump of bushes on a little hill,
three hundred yards away, Bad Rufe wheeled half-way round and fell
back out of sight into the sheriff's arms. Every Falin made a
nervous reach for his pistol, the line of gun-muzzles covering
them wavered slightly, but the Tollivers stood still and
unsurprised, and when Hale dashed from the door again, there was a
grim smile of triumph on old Judd's face. He had kept his promise
that Rufe should never hang.

"Steady there," said Hale quietly. His pistol was on his hip now
and a Winchester was in his left hand.

"Stand where you are--everybody!"

There was the sound of hurrying feet within the jail. There was
the clang of an iron door, the bang of a wooden one, and in five
minutes from within the tall wooden box came the sharp click of a
hatchet and then--dully:

"T-H-O-O-MP!" The dangling rope had tightened with a snap and the
wind swayed it no more.

At his cell door the Red Fox stood with his watch in his hand and
his eyes glued to the second-hand. When it had gone three times
around its circuit, he snapped the lid with a sigh of relief and
turned to his hammock and his Bible.

"He's gone now," said the Red Fox.

Outside Hale still waited, and as his eyes turned from the
Tollivers to the Falins, seven of the faces among them came back
to him with startling distinctness, and his mind went back to the
opening trouble in the county-seat over the Kentucky line, years
before--when eight men held one another at the points of their
pistols. One face was missing, and that face belonged to Rufe
Tolliver. Hale pulled out his watch.

"Keep those men there," he said, pointing to the Falins, and he
turned to the bewildered Tollivers.

"Come on, Judd," he said kindly--"all of you."

Dazed and mystified, they followed him in a body around the corner
of the jail, where in a coffin, that old Jadd had sent as a blind
to his real purpose, lay the remains of Bad Rufe Tolliver with a
harmless bullet hole through one shoulder. Near by was a wagon and
hitched to it were two mules that Hale himself had provided. Hale
pointed to it:

"I've done all I could, Judd. Take him away. I'll keep the Falins
under guard until you reach the Kentucky line, so that they can't
waylay you."

If old Judd heard, he gave no sign. He was looking down at the
face of his foster-brother--his shoulder drooped, his great frame
shrunken, and his iron face beaten and helpless. Again Hale spoke:

"I'm sorry for all this. I'm even sorry that your man was not a
better shot."

The old man straightened then and with a gesture he motioned young
Dave to the foot of the coffin and stooped himself at the head.
Past the wagon they went, the crowd giving way before them, and
with the dead Tolliver on their shoulders, old Judd and young Dave
passed with their followers out of sight.

XXX

The longest of her life was that day to June. The anxiety in times
of war for the women who wait at home is vague because they are
mercifully ignorant of the dangers their loved ones run, but a
specific issue that involves death to those loved ones has a
special and poignant terror of its own. June knew her father's
plan, the precise time the fight would take place, and the
especial danger that was Hale's, for she knew that young Dave
Tolliver had marked him with the first shot fired. Dry-eyed and
white and dumb, she watched them make ready for the start that
morning while it was yet dark; dully she heard the horses snorting
from the cold, the low curt orders of her father, and the exciting
mutterings of Bub and young Dave; dully she watched the saddles
thrown on, the pistols buckled, the Winchesters caught up, and
dully she watched them file out the gate and ride away, single
file, into the cold, damp mist like ghostly figures in a dream.
Once only did she open her lips and that was to plead with her
father to leave Bub at home, but her father gave her no answer and
Bub snorted his indignation--he was a man now, and his now was the
privilege of a man. For a while she stood listening to the ring of
metal against stone that came to her more and more faintly out of
the mist, and she wondered if it was really June Tolliver standing
there, while father and brother and cousin were on their way to
fight the law--how differently she saw these things now--for a man
who deserved death, and to fight a man who was ready to die for
his duty to that law--the law that guarded them and her and might
not perhaps guard him: the man who had planted for her the dew-
drenched garden that was waiting for the sun, and had built the
little room behind her for her comfort and seclusion; who had sent
her to school, had never been anything but kind and just to her
and to everybody--who had taught her life and, thank God, love.
Was she really the June Tolliver who had gone out into the world
and had held her place there; who had conquered birth and speech
and customs and environment so that none could tell what they all
once were; who had become the lady, the woman of the world, in
manner, dress, and education: who had a gift of music and a voice
that might enrich her life beyond any dream that had ever sprung
from her own brain or any that she had ever caught from Hale's?
Was she June Tolliver who had been and done all that, and now had
come back and was slowly sinking back into the narrow grave from
which Hale had lifted her? It was all too strange and bitter, but
if she wanted proof there was her step-mother's voice now--the
same old, querulous, nerve-racking voice that had embittered all
her childhood--calling her down into the old mean round of
drudgery that had bound forever the horizon of her narrow life
just as now it was shutting down like a sky of brass around her
own. And when the voice came, instead of bursting into tears as
she was about to do, she gave a hard little laugh and she lifted a
defiant face to the rising sun. There was a limit to the sacrifice
for kindred, brother, father, home, and that limit was the eternal
sacrifice--the eternal undoing of herself: when this wretched
terrible business was over she would set her feet where that sun
could rise on her, busy with the work that she could do in that
world for which she felt she was born. Swiftly she did the morning
chores and then she sat on the porch thinking and waiting.
Spinning wheel, loom, and darning needle were to lie idle that
day. The old step-mother had gotten from bed and was dressing
herself--miraculously cured of a sudden, miraculously active. She
began to talk of what she needed in town, and June said nothing.
She went out to the stable and led out the old sorrel-mare. She
was going to the hanging.

"Don't you want to go to town, June?"

"No," said June fiercely.

"Well, you needn't git mad about it--I got to go some day this
week, and I reckon I might as well go ter-day." June answered
nothing, but in silence watched her get ready and in silence
watched her ride away. She was glad to be left alone. The sun had
flooded Lonesome Cove now with a light as rich and yellow as
though it were late afternoon, and she could yet tell every tree
by the different colour of the banner that each yet defiantly
flung into the face of death. The yard fence was festooned with
dewy cobwebs, and every weed in the field was hung with them as
with flashing jewels of exquisitely delicate design: Hale had once
told her that they meant rain. Far away the mountains were
overhung with purple so deep that the very air looked like mist,
and a peace that seemed motherlike in tenderness brooded over the
earth. Peace! Peace--with a man on his way to a scaffold only a
few miles away, and two bodies of men, one led by her father, the
other by the man she loved, ready to fly at each other's throats--
the one to get the condemned man alive, the other to see that he
died. She got up with a groan. She walked into the garden. The
grass was tall, tangled, and withering, and in it dead leaves lay
everywhere, stems up, stems down, in reckless confusion. The
scarlet sage-pods were brown and seeds were dropping from their
tiny gaping mouths. The marigolds were frost-nipped and one lonely
black-winged butterfly was vainly searching them one by one for
the lost sweets of summer. The gorgeous crowns of the sun-flowers
were nothing but grotesque black mummy-heads set on lean, dead
bodies, and the clump of big castor-plants, buffeted by the wind,
leaned this way and that like giants in a drunken orgy trying to
keep one another from falling down. The blight that was on the
garden was the blight that was in her heart, and two bits of cheer
only she found--one yellow nasturtium, scarlet-flecked, whose
fragrance was a memory of the spring that was long gone, and one
little cedar tree that had caught some dead leaves in its green
arms and was firmly holding them as though to promise that another
spring would surely come. With the flower in her hand, she started
up the ravine to her dreaming place, but it was so lonely up there
and she turned back. She went into her room and tried to read.
Mechanically, she half opened the lid of the piano and shut it,
horrified by her own act. As she passed out on the porch again she
noticed that it was only nine o'clock. She turned and watched the
long hand--how long a minute was! Three hours more! She shivered
and went inside and got her bonnet--she could not be alone when
the hour came, and she started down the road toward Uncle Billy's
mill. Hale! Hale! Hale!--the name began to ring in her ears like a
bell. The little shacks he had built up the creek were deserted
and gone to ruin, and she began to wonder in the light of what her
father had said how much of a tragedy that meant to him. Here was
the spot where he was fishing that day, when she had slipped down
behind him and he had turned and seen her for the first time. She
could recall his smile and the very tone of his kind voice:

"Howdye, little girl!" And the cat had got her tongue. She
remembered when she had written her name, after she had first
kissed him at the foot of the beech--"June HAIL," and by a
grotesque mental leap the beating of his name in her brain now
made her think of the beating of hailstones on her father's roof
one night when as a child she had lain and listened to them. Then
she noticed that the autumn shadows seemed to make the river
darker than the shadows of spring--or was it already the stain of
dead leaves? Hale could have told her. Those leaves were floating
through the shadows and when the wind moved, others zig-zagged
softly down to join them. The wind was helping them on the water,
too, and along came one brown leaf that was shaped like a tiny
trireme--its stem acting like a rudder and keeping it straight
before the breeze--so that it swept past the rest as a yacht that
she was once on had swept past a fleet of fishing sloops. She was
not unlike that swift little ship and thirty yards ahead were
rocks and shallows where it and the whole fleet would turn topsy-
turvy--would her own triumph be as short and the same fate be
hers? There was no question as to that, unless she took the wheel
of her fate in her own hands and with them steered the ship.
Thinking hard, she walked on slowly, with her hands behind her and
her eyes bent on the road. What should she do? She had no money,
her father had none to spare, and she could accept no more from
Hale. Once she stopped and stared with unseeing eyes at the blue
sky, and once under the heavy helplessness of it all she dropped
on the side of the road and sat with her head buried in her arms--
sat so long that she rose with a start and, with an apprehensive
look at the mounting sun, hurried on. She would go to the Gap and
teach; and then she knew that if she went there it would be on
Hale's account. Very well, she would not blind herself to that
fact; she would go and perhaps all would be made up between them,
and then she knew that if that but happened, nothing else could
matter...

When she reached the miller's cabin, she went to the porch without
noticing that the door was closed. Nobody was at home and she
turned listlessly. When she reached the gate, she heard the clock
beginning to strike, and with one hand on her breast she
breathlessly listened, counting--"eight, nine, ten, eleven"--and
her heart seemed to stop in the fraction of time that she waited
for it to strike once more. But it was only eleven, and she went
on down the road slowly, still thinking hard. The old miller was
leaning back in a chair against the log side of the mill, with his
dusty slouched hat down over his eyes. He did not hear her coming
and she thought he must be asleep, but he looked up with a start
when she spoke and she knew of what he, too, had been thinking.
Keenly his old eyes searched her white face and without a word he
got up and reached for another chair within the mill.

"You set right down now, baby," he said, and he made a pretence of
having something to do inside the mill, while June watched the
creaking old wheel dropping the sun-shot sparkling water into the
swift sluice, but hardly seeing it at all. By and by Uncle Billy
came outside and sat down and neither spoke a word. Once June saw
him covertly looking at his watch and she put both hands to her
throat--stifled.

"What time is it, Uncle Billy?" She tried to ask the question
calmly, but she had to try twice before she could speak at all and
when she did get the question out, her voice was only a broken
whisper.

"Five minutes to twelve, baby," said the old man, and his voice
had a gulp in it that broke June down. She sprang to her feet
wringing her hands:

"I can't stand it, Uncle Billy," she cried madly, and with a sob
that almost broke the old man's heart. "I tell you I can't stand
it."

* * * * * * *

And yet for three hours more she had to stand it, while the
cavalcade of Tollivers, with Rufe's body, made its slow way to the
Kentucky line where Judd and Dave and Bub left them to go home for
the night and be on hand for the funeral next day. But Uncle Billy
led her back to his cabin, and on the porch the two, with old Hon,
waited while the three hours dragged along. It was June who was
first to hear the galloping of horses' hoofs up the road and she
ran to the gate, followed by Uncle Billy and old Hon to see young
Dave Tolliver coming in a run. At the gate he threw himself from
his horse:

"Git up thar, June, and go home," he panted sharply. June flashed
out the gate.

"Have you done it?" she asked with deadly quiet.

"Hurry up an' go home, I tell ye! Uncle Judd wants ye!"

She came quite close to him now.

"You said you'd do it--I know what you've done--you--" she looked
as if she would fly at his throat, and Dave, amazed, shrank back a
step.

"Go home, I tell ye--Uncle Judd's shot. Git on the hoss!"

"No, no, NO! I wouldn't TOUCH anything that was yours"--she put
her hands to her head as though she were crazed, and then she
turned and broke into a swift run up the road.

Panting, June reached the gate. The front door was closed and
there she gave a tremulous cry for Bub. The door opened a few
inches and through it Bub shouted for her to come on. The back
door, too, was closed, and not a ray of daylight entered the room
except at the port-hole where Bub, with a Winchester, had been
standing on guard. By the light of the fire she saw her father's
giant frame stretched out on the bed and she heard his laboured
breathing. Swiftly she went to the bed and dropped on her knees
beside it.

"Dad!" she said. The old man's eyes opened and turned heavily
toward her.

"All right, Juny. They shot me from the laurel and they might nigh
got Bub. I reckon they've got me this time."

"No--no!" He saw her eyes fixed on the matted blood on his chest.

"Hit's stopped. I'm afeared hit's bleedin' inside." His voice had
dropped to a whisper and his eyes closed again. There was another
cautious "Hello" outside, and when Bub again opened the door Dave
ran swiftly within. He paid no attention to June.

"I follered June back an' left my hoss in the bushes. There was
three of 'em." He showed Bub a bullet hole through one sleeve and
then he turned half contemptuously to June:

"I hain't done it"--adding grimly--"not yit. He's as safe as you
air. I hope you're satisfied that hit hain't him 'stid o' yo'
daddy thar."

"Are you going to the Gap for a doctor?"

"I reckon I can't leave Bub here alone agin all the Falins--not
even to git a doctor or to carry a love-message fer you."

"Then I'll go myself."

A thick protest came from the bed, and then an appeal that might
have come from a child.

"Don't leave me, Juny." Without a word June went into the kitchen
and got the old bark horn.

"Uncle Billy will go," she said, and she stepped out on the porch.
But Uncle Billy was already on his way and she heard him coming
just as she was raising the horn to her lips. She met him at the
gate, and without even taking the time to come into the house the
old miller hurried upward toward the Lonesome Pine. The rain came
then--the rain that the tiny cobwebs had heralded at dawn that
morning. The old step-mother had not come home, and June told Bub
she had gone over the mountain to see her sister, and when, as
darkness fell, she did not appear they knew that she must have
been caught by the rain and would spend the night with a
neighbour. June asked no question, but from the low talk of Bub
and Dave she made out what had happened in town that day and a
wild elation settled in her heart that John Hale was alive and
unhurt--though Rufe was dead, her father wounded, and Bub and Dave
both had but narrowly escaped the Falin assassins that afternoon.
Bub took the first turn at watching while Dave slept, and when it
was Dave's turn she saw him drop quickly asleep in his chair, and
she was left alone with the breathing of the wounded man and the
beating of rain on the roof. And through the long night June
thought her brain weary over herself, her life, her people, and
Hale. They were not to blame--her people, they but did as their
fathers had done before them. They had their own code and they
lived up to it as best they could, and they had had no chance to
learn another. She felt the vindictive hatred that had prolonged
the feud. Had she been a man, she could not have rested until she
had slain the man who had ambushed her father. She expected Bub to
do that now, and if the spirit was so strong in her with the
training she had had, how helpless they must be against it. Even
Dave was not to blame--not to blame for loving her--he had always
done that. For that reason he could not help hating Hale, and how
great a reason he had now, for he could not understand as she
could the absence of any personal motive that had governed him in
the prosecution of the law, no matter if he hurt friend or foe.
But for Hale, she would have loved Dave and now be married to him
and happier than she was. Dave saw that--no wonder he hated Hale.
And as she slowly realized all these things, she grew calm and
gentle and determined to stick to her people and do the best she
could with her life.

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